Wry wit from Jaffe, sharp insight from Bowling

Nova Scotia’s Gaspereau Press and Toronto’s Guernica Editions have issued, respectively, new works by poets Tim Bowling and Ellen S. Jaffe. Though Gaspereau has published my work, and Guernica plans to do so, I admit no conflict-of-interest in reviewing these poets.

Bowling’s Circa Nineteen Hundred and Grief (Gaspereau, $20) is his twelfth verse outing. His patient art attains a simplicity that seems superficial, but only at first glance or a single reading.

Now 50, he’s entering the age of grace, when childhood is no longer “lost,” but rather is recognized anew as having never been abandoned, only repressed: “I wake everyday in disbelief that I am not ten years old…/

When I laugh, I laugh just as if I were ten years old. / When I cry, I cry just as if I were ten years old… // Ten years old is hating church but loving stained glass.”

The first poem makes the point: “Childhood / I want it back. It is unseemly / to admit so.”

If youth is about discovery, it is also about establishing — the “self” we will later reveal: “The first guy I ever punched / became a cop who beat / his kids. I empty this cartridge / of the blood he shed / when I busted his nose.”

Along with subtly profound thought about the odyssey of life, time passing and things changing (not always for the better), et cetera, Bowling presents imagery that’s nature-oriented (as in most Canadian verse), but also exact: “Dusk. Rain. / The freshly-painted skiff’s / a sloppy clown’s grin / along the slough bank…”

These lyrics analyze generations (not history, really) and foreground the nature that is backdrop: “My father walked to work, and his work was on the water. / His journey through blossom, cat-shadow, and rain.”

The plain observations open up to plangent questions: “What would it mean to look / at the world as if each look / freed a child from pain?”

Bowling offers neatly, suavely constructed meditations on life that ask us to think, then think again, on what we think we have learned, or what we claim “now” to know…Ellen S. Jaffe is decidedly more playful than is Bowling, and the fact is suggested by her title, Skinny-Dipping with the Muse (Guernica, $20). Yet, like Bowling, she thinks about time past and its metaphysical import, and also about mortality.

In particular, Jaffe struggles to reconcile the inhuman tragedy of the Holocaust with a North American family history that is civilized, liberal, and middle-class.

Some of the poems juxtapose that original horror with domestic or workaday life: “How to explain to Grade Three students / about cremating my cat, / instead of burying her in the garden? How to say / we do this to people, too?”

Another poem states, “I do not know the name of the ship you sailed in…, / across oceans the colour of pogroms, / bayonets, and the icy breath of horses….” History is a haunting, even if the new day in the new land is sun-lit and promising. Still, Jaffe’s dominant tone is jaunty. A doctor-father is remembered as “bringing home plaster models (of the heart) / instead of valentines.”

A love poem that must win smiles is “Fay Wray Writes to King Kong,” in which the now-aged actress writes, tongue-in-cheek to the movie monster whose own fame has sustained hers: “Marriage wouldn’t have worked out — / you couldn’t be house-broken, / and, of course, we were an inter-racial couple….”

“Ruby Slippers” imagines Dorothy keeping the special shoes once she awakes in Kansas following her dream-journey to Oz.

Jaffe’s models are Canadian, feminist, political but funky, women poets like Lorna Crozier, Anne Michaels, and Bronwen Wallace. Thus, “Mammograms,” merges the erotic imagery of The Song of Songs with the medical language of breast cancer, all to mourn a missing lover: “even now …/ my breasts grow rosy / with remembered song / sweet as Solomon’s // as I document / your absence // my grief metastasizes…, / fills my breasts with dark and desperate longing…”